Mods, sorry this might seem very OT, but today I watched this really freaky and interesting documentary about the "Kozyrev Mirror," a time travel device that was theorized by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev while in solitary confinement. Could this be Q's "Thing Mirror"?!? Link inside.
(media.greatawakening.win)
THINK MIRROR
This is a waste of contemplation. Time travel or viewing is a fantasy. There is no destination and nothing to view. (The past and the future are only memories or fantasies, respectively.)
Yes, we could view scenes from 100 years ago from a mirror out in space. But the mirror would have to be placed in position 50 years ago. Time machine, anyone? And then you would have to make sense of the faint, tiny image that would be returned. No audio. You might be able to make out the weather.
Your self confidence is awesome.
Oh believe me, he's a peach.
It takes no confidence to realize what is real. Too much wild speculation in modern physics.
This is from the 1930's.
To be fair, Kozyrev seems to be an interesting physicist who got caught in the political gears of the Stalinist regime. He had an unusual mirror that he experimented with, possibly giving him his idea about viewing time. It seems to have been more of a parapsychological approach. But it is a forlorn idea. There is only one actual time (the present). We can maybe capture some fading signals from the past (no longer existing), but there is nothing to come from the future (not yet existing). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Aleksandrovich_Kozyrev
Einstein's "theory of relativity" demonstrates how time is relative to the person observing time. Time is not static, it is relative. You should research that theory to familiarize yourself with the concept, and how it relates to time.
Great arm-waving, but no refutation of what I said. Yes, I am acquainted with relativity theory. It does not allow us to view our own past. We all see a sky full of stars according to their pasts, but we can't go farther into their past or into their future. All the "time tricks" involve the finite speed of photons, not any ability to travel in time. And certainly no ability to see a future, which hasn't yet happened.
The mathematical formula that proves that an object can reflect/refract waves in a manner that produces a "negative refractive index" was also created by a Russian mathematician in the early 1960's.
The theory being discussed is sound. The basic part of it simply boils down to the question of: How long can light be reflected into itself, and then later viewed in order to witness the past in the present?
A negative refractive index is interesting and real, but has no relationship to viewing the past. It does not (for example) pertain to making light propagate backward in time. It only pertains to the behavior of Snell's Law and other aspects of refraction.
I don't know what theory you are referring to. The idea of optical delay trains is an old one and the answer is that anything more than a microsecond would be a significant problem (without even considering signal loss upon each reflection). You would also be looking at an event from an effective optical distance of hundreds of meters. It would be easier to record the event on television and play it back. We've been doing that for about 80 years already. Even longer if you include motion picture photography. So, there's no problem about recording the present to be viewed in the future, but there is no way to view the past from the present without having such records available.